Education icon Diane Ravitch championed education reform from
vouchers to charter schools. Now she champions against all that. Calls
it a mistake. We’ll ask why.

For years, Diane Ravitch was a big voice in hard-nosed school reform.
Working under President George H. W. Bush and after, she wanted teacher
accountability. She wanted school choice. She wanted charter schools. In the years that followed, we got No Child Left Behind, Race to the
Top, the Common Core — and lots of charter schools. But Diane Ravitch
has jumped ship. Reform has become an attack on public education
itself, she now argues. A Trojan horse for privatization. And the real
problem is poverty.

Diane Ravitch Responds To Questions at NPR.

Q: Here in Chicago, 50 schools were closed yet CPS plans to open
50+ more, staffed mostly by Teach for America – with public funds but
with no accountability. Meanwhile, public schools are being held more
accountable than ever. How is this acceptable?

It is outrageous that Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago,
closed 50 public elementary schools. This is unprecedented in the
history of US education. Every school that closed was a dagger in the
heart of the community. In most communities, the public school is the
most stable institution in the community. Why didn’t CPS help the
schools that needed help instead of closing them? Having claimed that
the schools were “underutilized,” CPS now plans to open 52 charter
schools under private management. These schools will be staffed by teach
for America, and very likely will be non-union. Thus, CPS will cut
costs by laying off experienced teachers and replacing them with poorly
trained temps who will leave within 2-3 years. The responsibility of the
board of CPS and the mayor is to improve public schools, not to destroy
them.

Q: How are the statistics by state affected by square miles and population of each state?

In my book, I document the performance of states and the
nation. The single most reliable predictor of test scores is family
income. The widest achievement gaps are between the haves and the
have-nots.

Q: How do you rate a teacher? Better yet tell me what the mission is for a school?

The best way to rate a teacher is not by test scores —
which say nothing about teacher quality but everything who was enrolled
in the classroom–but by informed professional judgment. By that, I mean
that those best qualified to do know if the teacher is doing a good job
is the teacher’s principals and peers. There is actually an outstanding
evaluation program in Montgomery County, Maryland, called “peer
assistance and review.” Every new teacher gets a mentor teacher who
helps the teacher learn the ropes; every tenured teacher who gets a low
rating from his or her principal is assigned a mentor teacher to help
them improve. The mentor teachers report to a committee made up of
principals and teachers; they recommend whether the teachers are
improving, or whether they need more support, or whether they should be
terminated. The committee decides. It has terminated over 200 teachers.
The system works. It has the trust of teachers and principals. It is
professional.

Q: Don’t the wealthy already have a huge advantage in education?
The parents are usually well educated, a major advantage to their
children, they can send their children to private schools of their
choice, they can live in communities with the best schools.

Of course the wealthy have huge advantages. Not only can
they pay for private schools, they can pay to live in rich suburbs with
public schools that can afford every advantage for their children.
Meanwhile, when state budgets hit, the wealthy districts can raise their
local property taxes to make up for any cuts, but the urban districts
lay off teachers, librarians, guidance counselors, nurses, eliminate the
arts, increase class sizes. We have a deeply unequal means of funding
our public schools, based mostly on property taxes. We also have a
higher degree of income inequality than at any time in the past century.
The children with the low test scores need smaller classes; they need
schools with guidance counselors and social workers; they need highly
experienced teachers; they need health clinics; they need libraries;
they need the arts. Instead, schools in urban districts are losing
everything that kids need. This is a disgrace. What do we give them
instead of what they need? Tests, test prep, and more tests.

Q: I do not understand why having the ability to choose a school
that fits an individual personality, learning style, and skill set and
the ability to walk away from a school if it is not working for them (or
not working period) can be anything but good.

When you walk away from the public responsibility to
maintain a good public school in every neighborhood, you abandon the
civic mission of public school. You abandon an institution that is a
pillar of our democratic society. You turn citizens into consumers who
feel no obligation to other people’s children, only to themselves. Many
people look enviously at the high-performing nations of Finland and
Korea. There are no charter schools or vouchers in Finland or Korea.
They have built a strong education profession and strong schools in
every neighborhood. The more choice, the more inequality, the more
segregation. Do we really want to go in that direction?

Q: Would Diane make private schools illegal if she could?

Absolutely not. I have a basic principle: if people want
to pay for private schools, go right ahead. It is a free country.
Private money for private schools; public money for public schools. If
the philanthropists decided to support catholic education, it would be
handsomely endowed. Instead the Walton family foundation is pouring
hundreds of millions into campaigns to divert public money to privately
managed schools and religious schools. We need a strong publicly funded
public school system and a good public school in every neighborhood.

Q: Why can’t students be educated like athletes? Have business come in & recruit the best for jobs!

Business doesn’t know best how to educate children, we
have many examples of that. Business operates on the basis of profit and
loss. They engage in “risk management.” they throw out the slow
learners; they exclude the ones with low test scores; they keep out the
kids with disabilities and the English language learners; and that is
how they can produce high test scores. Read “the blueberry story” in my
book. American schools have to educate all, not just those who are
likely to get high scores. Furthermore, as an aside, if you knew how
flawed the tests are, you would not put so much stock in scores. The main
thing you learn from test scores is the income of the students’
families. Some poor kids get high scores, and some rich kids get low
scores, but they are outliers.

Q: Where is the middle of the road argument? Let’s improve traditional public schools AND fix how charters operate.

Charters started as a means of helping and collaborating
with public schools. Over the past 20 years, they became a vehicle for
libertarians and others who hate public education and who want to
transfer public funding to private management. Read in my book about
ALEC, about the Walton family foundation, and the extremists in
Tennessee, North Carolina, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and
other states who are attacking public education and want to replace it
with vouchers and for-profit entrepreneurs. The middle of the road is
when those who support a vibrant and successful public school system
agree that charters must agree to accept the same proportion of English
language learners and students with disabilities as the neighboring
district. The middle of the road will be reached when charter supporters
agree that collaboration is better than competition and that they must
be both transparent and accountable and play by the same rules as public
schools.

Q: What about busing and destroying the integrity of community in public schools?

I believe that integration is important but that it is
best promoted by providing federal incentives for housing integration
and attracting children from diverse communities to go to school
together. The federal government, state governments, and local
governments created segregation (I document this in my book). Today, the
federal government could offer incentives and rewards to districts and
schools that promote integration to overcome the effects of past
policies. Imagine if the $5 billion that was wasted on Duncan’s “race to
the top” program had been spent to incentivize districts to show how
they could promote integration? It would have had far better impact on
communities, schools, and children than blowing those billions away to
encourage more testing and more school closings and more privatization.

Reviews of Reign of Error

From Jersey Jazzman: "Ravitch’s book is firmly planted in the here-and-now: she is a
devastating social critic who is well aware of the current political
environment in which what she calls “corporate reform” exists. But I got
the sense while reading Reign of Error that Ravitch is able to
skewer this agenda so efficiently because she’s seen it all before:
“corporate reform” is merely the latest iteration of the age-old
practice of blaming America’s schools for problems that they didn’t
create and won’t be able to solve on their own."

From Amazon: "From one of the foremost authorities on education in the United States,
former U.S. assistant secretary of education, “whistle-blower
extraordinaire” (The Wall Street Journal), author of the best-selling The Death and Life of the Great American School System (“Important and riveting”—Library Journal), The Language Police (“Impassioned . . . Fiercely argued . . . Every bit as alarming as it is illuminating”—The New York Times),
and other notable books on education history and policy—an incisive,
comprehensive look at today’s American school system that argues against
those who claim it is broken and beyond repair; an impassioned but
reasoned call to stop the privatization movement that is draining
students and funding from our public schools."

From The Atlantic: "The survival of the school-reform
movement, as it’s known to champions and detractors alike, is no longer
assured. Even a couple years ago, few would have predicted this turn of
events for a crusade that began with the publication of A Nation at Risk
in 1983, gathered momentum as charter schools and Teach for America
took off in the 1990s, and surged into the spotlight with No Child Left
Behind in 2001. As a schoolteacher, I know I didn’t anticipate this
altered landscape. If one person can be credited—or blamed—for the
reform movement’s sudden vulnerability, it’s a fiercely articulate
historian, now in her 70s, named Diane Ravitch."

From Jose Vilson: "Anyone with a sharp eye for societal
dynamics understands that our current wave of education reform is code for
“getting the Black and Latino kids educated,” and Diane Ravitch spends an
appropriate amount of time speaking about the dynamics of race, speaking on the
effects of segregation and immigration in a way that makes her sound, yes,
reasonable and hip to the way the education landscape currently operates. In
fact, she makes the case that all children can succeed and have raised their
success rate across the board, but the gaps exist due to poverty and not race."

From EduShyster: "The hoax in the book’s subtitle refers
first and foremost to the deception that our public schools are in
decline. As Ravitch documents in detail, test scores are at their
highest point ever recorded, while high school dropouts are at their
lowest point and more students are graduating from high school than at
any point in American history. But the best hoaxes are impervious to
facts and the one about our failing schools is no exception."

From Imagine Wisconsin: "Public
education advocates will also not be surprised to see the free market
reformers lash out with well-funded, emotional messages attacking
Ravitch. Reign of Error
outs the reformers trying to raze public education. Their typical
defense is to speak loudly and attack the messenger. This is, after all,
just part of the free market process. For market-focused reformers to
get ahead, government-run education must not succeed. Free marketeers
pretend to be reforming when they are actually focused on destroying.
Sadly, America’s neediest kids get pinned under the rubble."

From Nicholas Tampico: “Ravitch believed otherwise in the 1990s and early 2000s when she allied
with conservative politicians, scholars, and institutions, but she
changed her mind about market-based education reforms after she examined
their early results. Ravitch once endorsed voluntary national education
standards; her modified position now is that state education
departments should provide curriculum frameworks. A critique of Reign of Error is that state control still means that people in faraway places can determine how our children are educated.”

From Deborah Meier: "Reign of Error lays out step by step the relentless thirty year
drive to either centralize the education of the young—on one hand—or
divest it entirely into privatized hands on the other. Finally, the two
sides have joined forces on a strategy that simultaneously does both.
While this coalition has many old roots, in its current form it began
with the fanfare around the publication of A Nation at Risk
(1983). Ravitch was, at that time, a supporter of this bold statement
that more or less accused America’s teachers and school boards of a plot
to undermine American health and welfare of the international scene."

From Seattle Education: "Dr. Ravitch breaks down the amount of money spent on students in charter
schools as opposed to students in public schools. Charter schools spend
significantly less on their pupils than their public school
counterparts and instead spend more money on administration, not
teachers."

From OpEdNews: "Reign of Error: The Hoax of the
Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools'
'Dr. Ravitch shatters one corporate reform myth after another with
clarity providing excellent background information in the Notes and
Appendix. This book is a reference guide to all things ed reform. Don't
understand much about test scores? Check out the chapters 'The Facts
About Test Scores' and 'The Facts About International Test Scores'.
Don't know the history of Michelle Rhee? Go to 'The Mystery of Michele
Rhee'. How about the Parent Trigger? Read the chapter 'Parent Trigger or
Parent Tricker'."

From Random House: "​In Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch argues that the crisis in
American education is not a crisis of academic achievement but a
concerted effort to destroy public schools in this country. She makes
clear that, contrary to the claims being made, public school test scores
and graduation rates are the highest they’ve ever been, and dropout
rates are at their lowest point. She argues that federal
programs such as George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Barack
Obama’s Race to the Top set unreasonable targets for American students,
punish schools, and result in teachers being fired if their students
underperform, unfairly branding those educators as failures. She warns
that major foundations, individual billionaires, and Wall Street hedge
fund managers are encouraging the privatization of public education,
some for idealistic reasons, others for profit. Many who work with
equity funds are eyeing public education as an emerging market for
investors.

Anyone
with a sharp eye for societal dynamics understands that our current
wave of education reform is code for “getting the Black and Latino kids
educated,” and Diane Ravitch spends an appropriate amount of time
speaking about the dynamics of race, speaking on the effects of
segregation and immigration in a way that makes her sound, yes,
reasonable and hip to the way the education landscape currently
operates. In fact, she makes the case that all children can succeed and
have raised their success rate across the board, but the gaps exist due
to poverty and not race. - See more at:
http://thejosevilson.com/im-diane-ravitch-im-tired-shit-review-reign-error/#sthash.Ep35mfAB.MidDSdaO.dpuf

Anyone
with a sharp eye for societal dynamics understands that our current
wave of education reform is code for “getting the Black and Latino kids
educated,” and Diane Ravitch spends an appropriate amount of time
speaking about the dynamics of race, speaking on the effects of
segregation and immigration in a way that makes her sound, yes,
reasonable and hip to the way the education landscape currently
operates. In fact, she makes the case that all children can succeed and
have raised their success rate across the board, but the gaps exist due
to poverty and not race. - See more at:
http://thejosevilson.com/im-diane-ravitch-im-tired-shit-review-reign-error/#sthash.Ep35mfAB.MidDSdaO.dpuf

Anyone
with a sharp eye for societal dynamics understands that our current
wave of education reform is code for “getting the Black and Latino kids
educated,” and Diane Ravitch spends an appropriate amount of time
speaking about the dynamics of race, speaking on the effects of
segregation and immigration in a way that makes her sound, yes,
reasonable and hip to the way the education landscape currently
operates. In fact, she makes the case that all children can succeed and
have raised their success rate across the board, but the gaps exist due
to poverty and not race. - See more at:
http://thejosevilson.com/im-diane-ravitch-im-tired-shit-review-reign-error/#sthash.Ep35mfAB.MidDSdaO.dpuf

From Accountable Talk: "I'd like to just briefly recommend this book to teachers everywhere. The
book is a thorough excoriation of the reform movement. Starting with
who the major players are and how they stand to benefit financially from
their "reforms", Ms. Ravitch unravels, one by one, all the myths spun
by the corporate raiders looking to cash in on public education dollars.
She lays bare the truth about all the favorite tropes of the reform
movement, such as test scores, the achievement gap, PISA, high school
and college graduation rates, merit pay, and many others."

From Daily Koz: "To be clear, it is not that Ravitch believes our schools are fine as
they are, or were before the recent generations of "reform." Far from
it, she points at many places where changes are needed. But she starts
from an understanding that seems to escape many on the other side of the
educational debate."

From the New York Post: "The book veers between argument and rant. Ravitch seems scarcely able to
stop sputtering out meaningless and irrelevant buzzwords that she hopes
will inspire ill will towards school choice. Again and again — hundreds
of times — she tosses out words meant to stir up irrational hatred. I
refer to words like “privatization” (which no one is proposing),
“entrepreneurs,” “corporations,” “profits” and (most hilariously)
“creationism,” which she claims is one of the hidden agendas of school
reformists."

From Ed Notes Online: "Ravitch covers a lot of ground, using lots of charts and graphs to
show how the claims by education deformers (Ravitch refers to them as “corporate
reformers”) that our nation’s schools are in crisis and are failing and
declining compared to other nations is not only not true but part of a design
by people tied into the educational-industrial complex to get their mitts on a
large chunk of the billions spent on education in this country."

From AlterNet: "Now, with Reign, we have Ravitch 3.0, displayed in a
comprehensive work that in many ways echoes not only her own blog, but
the growing arguments among educators and scholars that much of the reform agenda lacks evidence and that alternative commitments to education reform need to address poverty, equity, and opportunity."

From Leonie Haimson: "Her book
shows that within the historical context, student performance across the
country has never been better if measured by test scores and graduation rates,
and that even as the achievement gap stubbornly persists, the problem should be
addressed by narrowing the opportunity gap. This can be done by directly
addressing poverty and by providing more equitable school conditions, with
resources invested in reforms that have actually been proven to work, including
preK, smaller classes, a well-rounded education and wrap-around services. These
are the programs and conditions that the wealthy demand for their own
kids. Poor and disadvantaged children need the same things – only more so.
She also explains how schools, especially those with high-needs students, will only
be further undermined by the corporate reform agenda of test-driven
accountability, weakening of teacher tenure, merit pay, and online learning."

KSN&C

KSN&C

KSN&C is intended to be a place for well-reasoned civil discourse...not to suggest that we don’t appreciate the witty retort or pithy observation. Have at it. But we do not invite the anonymous flaming too often found in social media these days. This is a destination for folks to state your name and speak your piece.

It is important to note that, while the Moderator serves as Faculty Regent for Eastern Kentucky University, all comments offered by the Moderator on KSN&C are his own opinions and do not necessarily represent the views of the Board of Regents, the university administration, faculty, or any members of the university community.

On KSN&C, all authors are responsible for their own comments. See full disclaimer at the bottom of the page.

Why This Blog?

So far as we know, we only get one lifetime. So, when I "retired" in 2004, after 31-years in public education I wanted to do something different. I wanted to teach, write and become a student again. I have since spent a decade in higher ed.

I have listened to so many commentaries over the years about what should be done to improve Kentucky's schools - written largely by folks who have never tried to manage a classroom, run a school, or close an achievement gap. I came to believe that I might have something to offer.

I moved, in 1985, from suburban northern Kentucky to what was then the state’s flagship district - Fayette County. I have had a unique set of experiences to accompany my journey through KERA’s implementation. I have seen children grow to graduate and lead successful lives. I have seen them go to jail and I have seen them die. I have been amazed by brilliant teachers, dismayed by impassive bureaucrats, disappointed by politicians and uplifted by some of Kentucky’s finest school children. When I am not complaining about it, I will attest that public school administration is critically important work.

Democracy is run by those who show up. In our system of government every citizen has a voice, but only if they choose to use it.

This blog is totally independent; not supported or sponsored by any institution or political organization. I will make every effort to fully cite (or link to) my sources. Please address any concerns to the author.

On the campaign trail...with my wife Rita

An action shot: The Principal...as a much younger man.

Faculty Senate Chair

Serving as Mace Bearer during the Inauguration of Michael T. Benson as EKU's 12th president.

Teaching

EDF 203 in EKU's one-room schoolhouse.

Professin'

Lecturing on the history of Berea College to Berea faculty and staff, 2014.

Faculty Regent

One in a long series of meetings. 2016

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